10 years ago, who knew what his code would do?
By Kevin Maney, USA TODAY
SUNNYVALE, Calif. — Almost 10 years ago, college student Marc Andreessen posted the first Web browser. That led him to co-found Netscape Communications, which set off the Internet boom.
Over lunch recently at a local eatery, Andreessen, now 31, needs only a second to think of what surprised him most in a decade of megachange.
"EBay," he says. "Who knew there was that much crap in people's garages to sell?"
The Web browser opened the way for tremendous transformation in a flash. The software for the first time made it easy to navigate the Net, and for people and companies to post graphics and images. (Today, most people use Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer.) The ensuing Net explosion changed business and everyday life and inspired trillions of dollars in investment, a good deal of it unwise.
Following the dot-com bust and amid the tech industry's worst downturn in decades, USA TODAY went back to the start of the browser, which commercialized the Internet — and to the people who made it happen. Ten years ago, they were about to be swept into the funnel of a tornado, and they can appreciate its power as no one else as it continues to tear across the landscape. As it has changed our lives, so has it changed theirs.
For Jim Clark, Andreessen's co-founder of Netscape, these 10 years have sapped his entrepreneurial drive. In a rare interview via telephone from his Florida home, Clark, 58, says he is finished starting companies. In the early 1990s, he was tech's hottest entrepreneur.
"The economic appetite is gone," he says. Netscape "changed my life so incredibly, it's hard to comprehend. I made more than a billion dollars from a couple of years work."
James Barksdale, now 60, is the last of the triumvirate who rode Netscape into history. Last week, about to fly to Washington for a White House meeting of technology leaders, he shared an anecdote that shows how Corporate America knew little about the chaos ready to unfold.
In 1994, Barksdale had to resign from AT&T to accept an offer from Clark to be Netscape's CEO. Barksdale flew to New Jersey to tell AT&T's then-CEO, Robert Allen.
"Bob Allen told me I was nuts," Barksdale recalls. Three years later, Allen resigned, his company flailing. Dozens of big-name, big-company executives followed Barksdale's path to Internet companies.
A couple of the software wizards who helped Andreessen build the first browser at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign can't seem to grasp the enormity of what they've done.
"My only regret is I wish I was conscious while it was going on," jokes Aleks Totic, 36, referring to the intense pace that kept him focused on writing code. Adds Jon Mittelhauser, 32, "It's like your wedding day — it all rushes by, and you don't remember half of it."
Adding images to text
It's easy to forget what it was like before the revolution — before eBay, Amazon, Yahoo, Priceline, Napster and Web sites devoted to every topic any human could think of; before people used the Web to look for jobs, seek mates, buy goods and services and travel; before e-mail and instant messaging cheaply linked hundreds of millions; before Netscape ignited the dot-com boom with its 1995 initial public offering.
In 1993, the Internet was almost solely used by academic research scientists and the military. Navigating it required memorizing arcane text commands. Only a few years before, in a research lab in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee created the hypertext links that formed the basis for the World Wide Web, but that was still text-only and meant for research.
No one had created a visual way to navigate the Net. There was no way to put up images. As with old MS-DOS computers, all you could see was text.
Andreessen, Totic, Mittelhauser and a cabal of students worked part-time at the university's famed computer lab, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA). There, the idea of a visual browser bubbled to the surface. Andreessen and fellow NCSA worker Eric Bina grabbed it. The concept, Andreessen says, "was just there, waiting for somebody to actually do it."
The two slammed together the code for the first graphical browser. On March 14, 1993, Andreessen put it on NCSA's Internet site. He introduced it: "NCSA Mosaic provides a consistent and easy-to-use hypermedia-based interface into a wide variety of information sources."
Almost instantly, Internet users around the world started downloading copies, first a few, then a torrent. Andreessen started doing a "what's new" page of graphical postings on the Net. So little was there, Andreessen recalls, that "if an Indian restaurant posted its menu, that was a big deal."
For Andreessen, the thrill faded as Mosaic caught on. NCSA exerted more control over its development, and the existing Internet community lashed out at Mosaic. At a conference, Berners-Lee yelled at Andreessen, telling him that adding images to the Web was going to bring in a flood of new users who would do things like post photos of nude women.
"He was right," Andreessen now says with a shrug.
Silicon Valley companies usually get started by people who already know each other. It seems somehow fateful that Netscape's key players came together at all.
At NCSA in 1993, Mittelhauser and Totic recall, Andreessen got fed up with battles over Mosaic, so he left for Silicon Valley.
"Marc was like an ongoing soap opera," Totic recalls. "He got this pathetic job where he was, like, an intern, and he was e-mailing us daily dispatches. Then one of them said that he'd met Jim Clark. We were all like, 'Who's Jim Clark?' "
In one of those small but pivotal events in history, Bill Foss, an assistant to Clark at computer maker Silicon Graphics, then one of the Valley's most exciting names, had told Clark he should e-mail Andreessen. Foss had followed Mosaic and knew Clark was casting about for another company idea.
But Clark barely knew anything about the Internet. At SGI, he'd worked mostly on the hot field of interactive television. Andreessen was sick of Mosaic and wanted to do something else.
"We had two business plans," Andreessen says. One was in interactive TV. The other was to build an online gaming network for Nintendo machines.
One day, Clark says, he and Andreessen were in Clark's living room, struggling over ideas. Andreessen said he wanted to work with his NCSA buddies but was afraid they'd get recruited somewhere else.
"Right there, in that moment, we said, 'Let's reproduce Mosaic,' " Clark says. "We hopped on a plane and flew to Illinois in the middle of a thunderstorm. We met the (rest of the NCSA gang) at a hotel and recruited them in 24 hours, and suddenly we had a company."
To celebrate, "We all went to the hotel bar," Totic says. "I remember there was a lot of Jägermeister."
Fast times at fast company
At first, they named their company Mosaic. It was set up over a storefront on Castro Street in Mountain View, Calif., in Silicon Valley.
"Over a period of about a month after that, it gradually dawned on me how big this will be," Clark says.
Mosaic established a prototypical Silicon Valley culture. Programmers worked all night and held 4 a.m. meetings at Denny's. They broke up the day with Superball fights and playing "chair football" by rolling around in their office chairs. In meetings, Andreessen would snack by plunging his hand into a box of Honeycomb cereal.
It was the time of their lives, and a time not unlike today's tech lull. The nation was climbing out of a recession, venture capitalists were cautious after suffering disasters such as a rush of so-called pen computing start-ups, which tried to make devices like the Palm computer before it was technologically possible, and some interesting new companies were exploding into view, including Cisco Systems, which in 2000 briefly became the most valuable company on Earth.
"The talent that came together at Netscape was truly miraculous," Mittelhauser says. "There was a void, and everyone was looking for the next big thing, and that attracted people."
While the programmers wrote code, Clark fought with NCSA, which owned the rights to the browser created on campus. NCSA wanted a royalty payment for every copy of the browser downloaded. Clark argued that the new version of Mosaic created in Mountain View was entirely new code, and NCSA had no claim. Eventually, Clark paid a settlement — never revealed but estimated to be $2 million — to NCSA, and the company changed its name to Netscape.
In a cosmic twist, NCSA continued to license its version of Mosaic. Microsoft bought a license to use NCSA's code to build its first Internet Explorer — the browser that overtook and sank Netscape in the late 1990s.
In mid-1994, Barksdale was looking at Fortune magazine at home. He was running McCaw Cellular, which was about to be bought by AT&T, and Fortune had named Netscape one of its "Cool Companies." Barksdale recalls thinking that Netscape was going to solve some major problems with accessing the Internet.
"I commented to my wife that this company is a terrific idea," Barksdale says. "It's the only time before or since I ever said anything like that to my wife when reading an article."
A few weeks later, a headhunter — David Beirne — called Barksdale and said that Netscape needed a CEO. "At first, I thought my wife set him up!" Barksdale says. Over the next few months, Barksdale was persuaded to take the job, which is when AT&T's Allen said he was nuts.
On Aug. 9, 1995, Netscape went public — one of the most significant single IPO events in history. Before the day was over, Netscape had climbed from its offering price of $28 to close at $58.25, setting the tone for hundreds of explosive IPOs in the coming Internet bubble.
Boom goes bust
Apparently, helping create Internet fever didn't inoculate Andreessen, Clark or Barksdale against it.
Netscape had its own boom and bust, becoming an international phenomenon before being vanquished by Microsoft, which bundled its Internet Explorer browser into its Windows operating system and gave it away. "If I look at the entire 10 years, the thing that amazes me most is that Microsoft got off scot-free," Clark says, clearly bitter that the Justice Department's antitrust actions against Microsoft resulted in little punishment.
In 1999, America Online, then a rising superstar, bought Netscape for $10 billion. The Netscape name and identity faded.
And then? To take advantage of the Net craze, Andreessen rushed to start Web services company Loudcloud within a few weeks of leaving AOL in 1999. "The pressure then on a new idea was absolutely insane," he says. Loudcloud went public in March 2001, as the bubble was deflating, and fell flat. Loudcloud has morphed into a $40 million company, Opsware, which Andreessen now runs.
Back in the Sunnyvale restaurant, Andreessen launches into a theory of the bubble, of which he was a beneficiary. Ten years ago, Andreessen was making $6.85 an hour at NCSA, his belly spilled out of rag-tag clothes, and he littered his car with fast-food wrappers. Now, he is slim and stylishly dressed. Parked outside is his impeccably clean Mercedes coupe.
"In the bubble, smart people lost confidence in their own judgment," Andreessen says. "You'd put in your money even if you couldn't figure out why it made sense. You'd think YOU were the one who wasn't getting it. Then in the light of day, you'd go, 'What was I thinking?' "
Clark started several other companies, including WebMD, myCFO.com and Shutterfly. None have been major successes. Barksdale started a venture investment firm, Barksdale Group, and put money into some dogs, most notably failed Internet grocer Webvan.
"I fell prey to some of it," Barksdale says.
Yet, he sounds more like a proud papa when he says of the bubble, "It was the greatest feeding frenzy of idea creation in the shortest time in history."
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